I noticed that in Plasma 6 the option to display in icons no longer appears. I’ve always found the sidebar view very confusing, and it’s always the first change I make when installing Plasma. Therefore, I would like you to consider your return. Thanks!
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Removal of the icon view was decided early on for Plasma 6 and communicated to a wider audience in one or several of Nate Graham’s blog posts.
A while ago I came up with a mock-up of a different kind of icon view, and there might be room for something like this eventually either in an inconspicuous place within System Settings or as a separate app altogether (I’d call it “Korset”). Some developer would have to make this a priority though, and I’m not seeing that right now.
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Hello,
I agree with Carlos.
I don’t understand why the kde developers removed the icon view for the settings part. This was very useful compared to the sidebar view. If something similar could reappear under Kde plasma 6, it would be greatly appreciated (new option or separate application).
@jpetso: your mock-up is very good.
Thanks in advance.
Alan.
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It’s actually not difficult to make one.
- Open Dolphin.
- Create a folder.
- Link “/usr/share/applications/kcm_*.desktop” into it.
- Now you have the icon view. Create a bookmark for it.
It’s highly unlikely that there will be a second mode like this in the future. We may or may not change how the default ones looks like.
So, now, I’m curious to see how it works on a touch screen.
I was also using the icon view but I honestly don’t know why because it never helped me find a setting. I always had to search for what I was looking for. The new design seems to me the it encourages you to search for a setting instead of clicking through icons until you find what you are looking for. 
And I have to admit that I adapted to the new UI like it was natural.
I would expect it to behave in a similar way to Discover’s behavior (try shrinking the width of Discover’s window and see how it looks). I guess this behavior is still work in progress in system settings.
I also agree with Carlos. The organization of the list view is quite different than the icon view and not nearly as intuitive for me. It takes me quite a bit longer to find things now and I usually have to use Search. With the icon view, I could configure a new installation to my preferences in about 5 minutes; I haven’t tried doing that with the new list view, but I suspect it would take close to an hour.
It seems odd that a useful feature that was probably already pretty well debugged would be removed; just wondering why.
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Same here. We clearly have some Mac OS fans with this settings change. 
For reference, KDE had the sidebar design by default at least as far back as the KDE 1.1 Control Center (1999). In fact, I’m pretty sure it predates the icon view, which I believe replaced the list view starting with Plasma 4.0 (2008), before the list view was once again made default in Plasma 5.11 (2017).
Meanwhile, macOS’s sidebar design for its System Settings was introduced with macOS Ventura (2022). Incidentally, Ventura was also the release which introduced the “System Settings” name, which Plasma had already been using for many years. macOS had previously been using an icon view since System 7 (1991), with System 6 (1988) and earlier instead using what could generously be called a massive mess (with a sidebar, of sorts).
So no, I don’t think it’s accurate to blame “Mac OS fans” for this one.
I beg to differ – I found the icon view very useful – every major topic easily visible on one screen (and you could still search if you wanted to). As a long-time KDE Plasma user, I’m sorry (and bummed) this feature was removed.
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